The Raspberry Pi version of Alexa’s software was lagging behind the release version. You had to press a button to input a command, which really steals a lot of the joy out of a creepy voice controlled robot listening to you putz around the house. Now, it can wake on command.

Since this sold him on finally adding Amazon’s ever watching witch eye to his home, he decided he would give it appropriately sinister clothes. These were 3D printed from files based on Adafruit’s guide. He ended up with a fairly convincing facade.

The inside is kind of melancholy. A lone Raspberry Pi 3 is held company by a microphone and audio amplifier. These are pretty much all that’s needed to make you home automated shopping experience dreams come true. Video after the break.

Extra points for this if you change the wake word from ‘Alexa’ to ‘HAL’. My thought has been to use a fairly simple voice recognition board for the wake word that would then trigger an RPi Alexa (or Amazon Tap) to do the actual command handling. But, I haven’t gotten around to trying it yet.

You can see from my comments that I’m kinda lazy about being the first one to do something…

That’s the part I’m currently working on. Snowboy (the wakeword engine that the Raspberry Pi version of Alexa uses) also has an option to customize the wakeword by using their API (https://snowboy.kitt.ai/).

The current version is using cmusphinx or pocketsphinx as local wake word detector. You can change the word in conifg.yaml. The art is in choosing a word that won’t get false positives all the time – hint “Hal”, ”Bob” are too short and monosyllabic. I tried that and footsteps in a quiet room were being detected as positives. Alexa has three syllables for good reason, still triggers every time someone on the radio says “electric”.
I have to do some digging around on the training model for sphinx as my implementation only recognises my voice (not kids or wife).
Changing the audio responses is good for some fun – mine greets you as if it is GladOS, and confirms commands with “Sir, Yes Sir!” from TF2’s soldier.

For me this is so obvious it needs not to be mentioned.
And now with Trump’s ‘more spying, and also torture’ group it becomes even more interesting that people invite this stuff into their homes. I really think humanity has gone collectively insane.
Maybe the muslims (ISIS and such) were just the canary that was the first sign of everybody going nuts, with the weakest minds going first.